Tofino artist Sébastien Correia
Photographer, Tofino

If legendary photographer Ansel Adams had embraced Buddhist art, it might look like this. Symmetrical labyrinthine mandalas made using nature's own patterns.

It is a Zen inverse of traditional print making where details form design. Instead, in Sebastien Correia's prints the design is created by details he photographs in nature. "The show is called Roots," he explains, "not just the roots of the Sound, but exploring the roots of where I am from."

Correia, 25, grew up in Tofino the son of local baker Dominique Desalier (now in Campbell River) and local designer and builder Philippe Correia. Over the past decade Correia's creative quests have taken him from video, to photography and design; which he now studies at the University of Victoria when not working in Tofino with his father.

Roots, his first show, is a synthesis of stream of consciousness photographic ramblings through Clayoquot Sound and computer design. "It's an instinctive process," he says. After many photography trips he realized that the black and white images that most often caught his intuition were roots, snags and the bleached silver of driftwood; the places where trees met the earth and anchored. On his computer Correia began the meditative process of taking this beauty and marrying it to the complexity he felt inherently inhabited these places of connection.

The results, some over four feet square, are a series of intricate, graceful and textured images that explore the rich complexities that hold us to this place.